HTML tags in comments

HTML tags haven’t been working in comments for a while. Prompted by Andrew Reynolds, I checked and found the problem was a plugin, which I’ve disabled. So you can all go back to including hyperlinks, as well as bold and italic tags. Just part of the friendly service.

I’ve also switched the RSS feed to provide the entire article rather than just the summary. Some people wanted this, and it seems like the way of the future, but feel free to discuss.

Firefox 1.5 for Mac loads the headlines fine using the “Live Bookmark” command. If you want a full-scale RSS feed it looks as if you need an add-on or separate aggregator. I’m still mostly using Safari myself, so others may be able to help further.

If you think you’ve got it tough, spare a thought for poor Archie of Archie and Mehitabel fame, back in typewriter days. He had to hit the keys by diving on them headfirst, and he could only do lower case apart from one time when someone left the shift key locked – and even then Mehitabel came along and pounced on it, releasing it.

Unfortunately my recent experiences as a ‘mature-age’ university student have been that some of the tutors doing assessment marking have such poor knowledge of English that any improvement I might make in mine would doom me to more battles over grades. Using “its/it’s” appropriately seems to be considered advanced at Uni these days.

I keep a copy at hand to lend to people who hand me reports etc. that are poorly punctuated. Fortunately, most of them realise that they have a problem. I imagine that would be difficult to do to a tutor at uni.
It does tend to reinforce your own inner pedant though – I now carry a pen to correct bad signs and I also notice where the sign’s meaning is incorrect or unclear.
A good example is on the Underground in London, where a sign reads “Penalty (pound sign)50 for any passenger who fails to show on demand a valid ticket for the entire journey.” Personally, I do not want to hold up my ticket for the entire journey if asked to – but I would be happy to show, on demand, a ticket, valid for my entire journey.

AR, you have just reminded me of Billy Connolly’s quip that he disobeyed a London Underground instruction that dogs should be carried on the escalators by not carrying a dog on the escalator. Oh, and he didn’t have a dog.

The RSS comments on Opera 8.5 still only show a few lines. For instance, this post came through as:

Prompted by Andrew Reynolds, I checked and found the problem was a plugin, which I’ve disabled. So you can all go back to including hyperlinks, as well as bold and italic tags.

I don’t particularly mind except sometimes the summaries are so short as to be meaningless, and at other times (due to the cruelties of going over my Optus broadband limit) I’m limited to 28.8kbps,and would rather not wait to download a 150KB page for an article I’m not interested in, or is in fact quite short.